The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in the city of Weimar by German architect Walter Gropius. Its core objective was a radical concept: to reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts. Gropius explained this vision for a union of crafts, art and technology in the Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar (1919), which described a utopian craft guild combining architecture, sculpture, and painting into a single creative expression [Gesamtkunstwerk]. Gropius developed a curriculum that would turn out artisans and designers capable of creating useful and beautiful objects appropriate to this new system of living.

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The Bauhaus combined elements of both fine arts and design education. The curriculum commenced with a preliminary course that immersed the students, who came from a diverse range of social and educational backgrounds, in the study of materials, colour theory, and formal relationships in preparation for more specialized studies. This preliminary course was often taught by visual artists, including Johannes Itten, László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky, among others.

The workshops included metalworking, weaving, ceramics, carpentry, graphic printing, printing and advertising, photography, glass and wall painting, stone and wood sculpture, and theatre. Among the teachers were also Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Hinnerk Scheper, Joost Schmidt, Gunta Stölzl, and Walter Peterhans. (More about the workshops, classes, and teachers and students.)

In 1925, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau. Gropius stepped down as director of the Bauhaus in April 1928, succeeded by the architect Hannes Meyer. Under pressure from an increasingly right-wing municipal government, Meyer resigned as director of the Bauhaus in 1930. He was replaced by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The political situation in Germany, combined with the perilous financial condition of the Bauhaus, caused Mies to relocate the school to Berlin in September 1932, where it operated on a reduced scale. The Bauhaus eventually dissolved itself under pressure from the Nazis in 1933.

During the years of World War II, many of the key figures of the Bauhaus emigrated to the United States, where their work and their teaching philosophies influenced generations of young architects and designers. Marcel Breuer and Josef Albers taught at Yale, Walter Gropius went to Harvard, and Moholy-Nagy established the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937. [2][3]

The following nine PDFs are linked from the Bibliothèque Kandinsky which published them online on an unknown date (follow this link to explore the respective entries on its website). This is an important milestone in the digitisation of essential but hard-to-get art publications for the public use and we would like to express our gratitude and appreciation. <3 ! The whole set of these high-quality digital facsimiles is about 1 GB large, if anyone feels like starting a torrent to relieve bandwidth of the library let us know and we'll include your link here. (17 Aug 2014). Update: you can now download the whole set in a single ZIP file from here. Thanks to Gabriel Benderski. (29 Aug 2014)

The New Vision: From Material to Architecture, trans. Daphne M. Hoffman, New York: Breuer Warren and Putnam, 1930; exp.rev.ed. as The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist, New York: George Wittenborn, 1947, 92 pp. (English)